Assessing Software Quality Through Visualised Cohesion Metrics

Cohesion is one of the most important factors for software quality as well as maintainability, reliability and reusability. Module cohesion is defined as a quality attribute that seeks for measuring the singleness of the purpose of a module. The module of poor quality can be a serious obstacle to th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Timothy Shih, Ming-Chi Lee, Teh-Sheng Huang, Lawrence Deng
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Australasian Association for Information Systems 2001-05-01
Series:Australasian Journal of Information Systems
Subjects:
Online Access:http://journal.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/238
Description
Summary:Cohesion is one of the most important factors for software quality as well as maintainability, reliability and reusability. Module cohesion is defined as a quality attribute that seeks for measuring the singleness of the purpose of a module. The module of poor quality can be a serious obstacle to the system quality. In order to design a good software quality, software managers and engineers need to introduce cohesion metrics to measure and produce desirable software. A highly cohesion software is thought to be a desirable constructing. In this paper, we propose a function-oriented cohesion metrics based on the analysis of live variables, live span and the visualization of processing element dependency graph. We give six typical cohesion examples to be measured as our experiments and justification. Therefore, a well-defined, well-normalized, well-visualized and well-experimented cohesion metrics is proposed to indicate and thus enhance software cohesion strength. Furthermore, this cohesion metrics can be easily incorporated with software CASE tool to help software engineers to improve software quality.
ISSN:1449-8618
1449-8618